I The Summoning
As Pepper pressed into the dimly lit room her cherry red nose was the first thing to make her aware that something foul had been going on. Rather than milk and cookies or gingerbread and gumdrops the room smelled of burnt hair and flesh. She tilted her tactical candy-cane down to adjust the light. Blood was running through a series of grooves crudely carved into the floor by some sharp implement. The shape of the ritual circle was hardly symmetrical but she'd seen it's kind before. Santa himself had warned her about this.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Patrick exclaimed entering the room after her and catching a whiff of the horrors within, he was the youngest in the whole squad. He turned a pale color as he dared to swing his flashlight over the chaos and gore of the room beyond.
Pepper knelt down in the center of the circle which was surrounded by ceremonial candles arranged haphazardly rather than with the precision that was truly necessary for such rituals. She pressed her gloved hand against the runes etched into the floor ignoring for a moment the emaciated and desecrated remains of the elf that had volunteered for this sacrifice. She recognized several of the demonic glyphs but stared intently at the one positioned near the very center of the sacrificial ring.
Suddenly a clatter arose across the room. She cocked her candy-cane and edged toward the shadowed corner of the room carefully. Patrick and Oliver were somewhere behind her with the rest of her squad in the hallway beyond. She saw the lumbering shape moving then, lifting the table that it was lying beneath easily up over it's head.
Instinct kicked in. She dropped. The table careened across the room knocking aside a sinister looking gingerbread village with pentagrams and runes painted in plaster on each miniature building. She fired off the first candy coated shell, watching as the demon stepped into the light only to be caught by the splintering candy canes shards. A moment of hesitation passed as she recognized who the transformed woman before her used to be. She'd known this elf.
The demon screeched and growled almost unhinging it's jaw to express its distaste for them.
Patrick was firing now and with her moment of recognition replaced with disgust and fear Pepper was firing again too. Again and again until nothing but peppermint dust remained in the chamber of her weapon. Until Sandy the elf, Sandy the demon, didn't have a head. Her lifeless body slumped over against the wall scrawling a brush stroke of blood.
"What the hell was that?" Patrick asked, "I've never seen an elf act like that."
"That was no elf kid," Oliver explained removing the corn-cob pipe from his mouth and stroking his beard, "That was a fucking demon."
Pepper tried to clear her mind as she lay in her quarters that night. Christmas was only a few nights away. There were thousands of elves in the facility around her. They lived honeycombed beneath the arctic ice so as to be hidden from even the most prying eyes, cloaked as if by magic, toiling for one singular purpose, to create a system of punishment and reward that kept the human children of planet Earth in line. Without this ancient moral system, without the naughty being punished and the nice rewarded, the world beyond would be a much darker place. It was an arcane system but it was one that worked.
Now there was a wrench in the works. They'd been chasing these ghosts for weeks now. Whispers of rituals being conducted. She and her crack squad of seven elves were Santa's last line of defense against any potential riots, rebellions, civil wars or anything under the polar sun that might threaten their Christmas mission.
As she lay in bed trying so hard to summon visions of sugarplums the only things that danced were demonic runes and dark rituals in dimly lit caverns. There were places beneath the ice where dangerous elves lived in isolation. Often it was the mad or insane, those who saw no benefit in making toys or helping deliver them. Those who had left the system behind or who the system had failed. Undesirables. Finding the pursuit of the Dark Arts among one of them wouldn't have shaken her so badly.
This time it had been a formerly upstanding family and even worse someone who she had known. Someone otherwise well adjusted. And despite the hastiness with which the circle had been etched and the imprecision of the ritual arrangement it had successfully raised something that the elders rarely talked about - a real flesh and blood demon.
The central rune still bothered her. Anxious and unable to sleep she slipped from her bed and pulled on her shoes being sure to remove the bell. She made for the archive hastily moving as quickly and quietly as she could. The few elves she did pass were too busy to notice her and even if they had they were likely too wrapped up in the final holiday preparations to have taken an interest in what she was doing.
She expected the Archives to be abandoned at this hour but standing in front of the door in a half asleep stupor stood Harold, one of the eldest elves that anyone knew of. Harold had been there, rumor had it, even during Nicolas' mortal life. Pepper tiptoed toward him and pushed her hand against the security pad at the door of the Archive. A series of swirling lights surrounded her palm chirping like happy Christmas bells as they granted her access.
No sooner had the door shut behind her she heard a familiar voice.
"May I help you find something Miss?"
She swung around to see Harold standing there with a bright wide smile on his face buried beneath the bushiest snow-white beard she'd ever seen. In fact, rather amusingly, she thought he looked more like a dwarf than an elf. He wondered if he wouldn't have been happier with a life mining ore and gems but than they were deep underneath the ice, they might as well have been in a mine.
Pepper eyed the elf suspiciously but soon her visage softened and she gave in to his inquiry.
"I'm not sure you can help me with what I need. Our investigation today turned up some very ancient symbols, I'm sure you've heard some of the rumors of what we found."
"I heard that poor Patrick was scared half to death," Harold nodded and he stopped there as if that was all he had heard.
"It's not exactly in keeping with the holiday spirit Harold, but I need you to find me every book you have on demonology and black magic."
Harold turned his head inquisitively for a moment but didn't say a word in either jest of judgment. He moved forward, beyond walls and walls of computers, of discs and drives containing centuries of knowledge. It wasn't just human knowledge stored here. The secrets of worlds untold were housed here but they were so numerous that even the longest live elves engaged only in study would likely never learn it all.
Of course much of the knowledge was also on how to make toys and presents in keeping with the tradition. Knowledge on the proper balance of reward and punishment and on how to manipulate the parents of Earth to believe that their spiritually bankrupt consumerist culture had produced all the wonderful gifts they gave on Christmas day. This deception was necessary. Without some idea of their own selflessness the true narcissism of the human race might show itself.
The Archive seemed to go on forever. Finally they got to place where musty old tomes and sealed scrolls from ages past replaced the technological methods of storage. Harold didn't speak as they reached the end of the library. He looked to his left and his right and checked behind him and Pepper briefly before lifting a book from the final bookshelf.
Pepper felt a sudden gust of wind and watched as the bookshelf shifted aside, rolling across the ornate marble floor to reveal a passage within.
Harold produced a torch from his robe and stepped inside. Pepper followed wondering for a moment if this was all a dream, if maybe sleep had found her and this was what it was showing her. Reality became apparent when the bookshelf slid back into place and Harold lit the torch. They began to make their way down the winding stairs into the darkness and all around them were books growing more and more ancient.
"It would be unwise for you to tell anyone that I have brought you here," Harold told her after many minutes of silent descending, "Even Santa himself would never approve of such a thing."
Ahead of them at the base of the stairs lie a large chamber filled not just with books and scrolls but with carvings, decorations, fantastic murals that must have been centuries old, if not older. As she drew closer she realized that it wasn't just a room of artifacts. A small statuette sat on the table ahead of her beside wood shavings that were little more than loose soil after so much time. She gasped as she realized where she was.
"This is the workshop," she held her hand over her mouth amazed at how loud her voice was in this cavernous place especially after the ages she had been silent, "This is THE workshop... but it looks so much older than I expected."
She looked at more of the forms in front of her. The statuettes, ancient toys, were mostly animals. An ox. A deer. A strange lion. An even stranger ox. They were almost dream-like representations, animistic, archetypal, almost alive.
"So is he," Harold said pointing to an incredibly detailed ornate carving showing Santa and his first elves, "The belief in the human world is that he co-opted Christmas from the figure known as Christ, he became a sacrilegious idol to obscure a more ancient truth. Pepper, nothing could be more backwards. We were here before Christ. We were here before Romulus and Remus suckled from the shewolf, and we have always upheld order in one way or another."
Harold gestured toward a series of symbols at the base of the carving. Runes that were familiar to her. Runes with a sinister and decidedly demonic aspect. She looked to Harold with eyes wide.
"My dear," he chuckled darkly, "Where on Earth did you think all the magic came from? Where on EARTH indeed!"
"It's not possible," she shook her head emphatically.
"Saints and heroes must often descend into the underworld to bring back great treasures," Harold explained collecting an ancient book bound in some sort of skin, "Nicolas was no different, he brought back with him the magic we needed to keep the humans under control, to keep them sane and orderly, for the most part. Surely you suspected something like this when he you briefed you on magic?"
"Not like this," Pepper said with bile rising in her throat.
"Do you think you could identify the rune if you saw it again?" Harold asked and Pepper realized just how much the elf must know about her ordeal. She nodded.
Her stomach was in knots as she sat the ancient work table and stared down at the nameless grimoire Harold had laid before her. She had never expected any of this. Perhaps, she had thought for a few moments, Santa knew more than he was letting on but never something that cut at the core of the system like this. There was a sanctity in what the elves had always done. The joy of good little boys and girls everywhere told her, in all the years of her life, that what they were doing was more than necessary, it was good.
She paged through the dusty book disgusted by what she saw. Even as she skimmed the broad outline became apparent. It was all true. The magic. The whimsy. The holiday cheer. It was all neither wholesome or holy. It was all powered by an ancient force, an energy buried in a place spoken of in the book called The Well. There was no question about the identity of this dark dimension. It had been given many names, of course, by both human and elfkin alike, but the Norse, the English, the Americans, they all called it Hell.
Finally she founded it, buried toward the end of the book in a passage that almost looked like some hasty editor had later attempted to redact it. The rune was there and beside it a passage about a certain demon. Her eyes went wide. It was a name she had heard before, in whispers and legends, in the ramblings of the madmen that lived in the ice caves beneath the facility. She dared not say it aloud.
"This is what I was afraid of," Harold whispered, his old ruddy face suddenly going white as a ghost, "He's coming back and this time I fear no price or sacrifice will sate his cruelty."
"You can't be serious," Pepper said with teeth swimming, somewhere between rage and absolute mental collapse, "I thought he was a legend, I thought he was one of THEIR legends, a human invention, folklore. Harold, he can't be real!"
Somewhere above them an explosion rocked the facility. A cloud of dust descended from the ancient ceiling above them as they both stared at each other intently.
"He is all too real my child," Harold whispered grimly, another distant explosion rocked the chamber, "and he is already here."
"I've got to do something," Pepper springing into action, "I can't just let him win! Christmas is three days away Harold! We can't just let him win!"
"What can we do?" Harold asked and almost as if answering his own question he retreated for a few moments into the darkness of the chamber. He returned with a scrap of paper in his left hand and a set of ancient gauntlets shaped like gumdrop candies in the other, "This page was torn from that book, it is a map to another relic of great power and ferocity. Santa made me promise that I would destroy it but I didn't."
"And those?" Pepper asked pointing to the gauntlets.
"If those explosions mean what I think you have quite the fight ahead of you, these Gumdrop Gauntlets are nearly indestructible, made from the same Hell magic that keeps this whole thing running," he handed her the gauntlets and smiled subtly once she'd put them on, "They are rage, brutal, without mercy but with these you will be worse. Rip and tear, until it is done."
Pepper nodded and turned toward the winding stairs with her heart in her throat.